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RetroDECK ‐ Story & Philosophy

RetroDECK's Story: How RetroDECK was born?

Let's take a step back.

RetroDECK was born on March 4th, 2022, in Kyoto, Japan, with the name of 351EDECK.

I am also one of the founding members of 351ELEC now AmberELEC.
What I wanted to do was to "port" 351ELEC to the Steam Deck, but instead of doing custom firmware to flash, I wanted to do it as a full application that could be launched from Steam.

Eventually, after talking to the other team members, we decided that we did not want to support another platform such as Steam Deck, so I decided to continue the project on my own, renaming it to RetroDECK.
Back then I had many options on how to create 351EDECK, such as a bash script, appimage and flatpak.
In the beginning I opted for a simple shell script, in fact RetroDECK aka 351EDECK v0.1a existed as a mere shell script.

However I had bad feedbacks from the community because someone was feeling unsafe to give my script the root privileges so evaluating the Steam Deck use case I felt like it was not the right direction to take, the people was not feeling comfortable to give the sudo to a random script downloaded from the internet, so they asked to packetize it in some way.

Valve suggests the flatpak technology to port the applications on Steam Deck so, I decided to follow their guidelines, and I created the `RetroDECK` that you know today, starting from a Manjaro virtual machine as a development environment because I did not have a Steam Deck yet.

// Xargon (Project Founder)

RetroDECK's Development Philosophy

Emulation is a global, multi-generational effort driven by the love for video game preservation. RetroDECK relies on the continuous development of its dependencies (emulators, front-end, game engines, systems, assets, etc.). It would be unfair to take credit, conceal, monetize, or obscure their work for our gain. Their software makes running the games possible, not RetroDECK alone.

We believe in free and open-source video game preservation and do not support predatory profit models for this project. Everything we do should be open, and we will not offer bad faith donation schemes or divide users into paying and non-paying groups.

We strive to maintain the best possible relationship with the teams that develop the third-party software we depend on. Everyone working on RetroDECK is immensely grateful for their efforts. Without these projects and passionate people, RetroDECK would not be possible.

You can find more about our dependencies and how to donate on the donations & license page on our wiki.

To the developers of third-party projects:

Please feel free to reach out to us, share your ideas, and collaborate.

We value your feedback and suggestions.

You are the backbone of our project, and we appreciate your contributions.

// The RetroDECK Team

Inspiration for RetroDECK

RetroDECK is inspired by embedded emulation systems like:

  • AmberELEC
  • EmuELEC
  • CoreELEC
  • Lakka
  • Batocera

The RetroDECK team includes several veterans from some of these projects as well as other talented individuals.

Long Term Vision and Goals of the RetroDECK Project

The long-term vision and goals of the RetroDECK project are to create an all-in-one application to manage your entire retro games backup library. The application should:

  • Be already configured and work seamlessly with your games.
  • Have disaster recovery and multi-device support with cloud saves and syncs.
  • Be easy to install with one-click installation.
  • Provide a "Console-like / Batocera-like" user experience.
  • Make it easy to manage collections of ROMs, mods, and ROM hacks.
  • Be configurable from within RetroDECK without needing to exit the application.
  • Integrate tightly with bundled emulators and expose more features to end users.
  • Be secure, safe, and stable.
  • Offer an easy way to manage external controllers and other inputs.
  • Support a majority of all supported emulators in ES-DE, providing at least one good option per system.
  • Support applications outside the scope of ES-DE.
  • Be plug-and-play, fulfilling the need for a portable retro gaming solution that you can bring to a friend’s or family member’s house. Just dock into the TV and get going!
  • Fully support Steam Deck, Linux Desktop, and other Linux-based handheld x86_64 devices.
  • and more!